Conventionally, a relatively large amount of critical and important content such as data etc., in business entities, for example in a corporate, resides on individual user machines, such as the personal computer, laptop computer etc. While backup of server machines is a routine activity that most business entities perform regularly, in the absence of an effective and practical backup mechanism on individual user machines, the critical content stored on the individual machines is vulnerable to loss of data in the event of a hard disk drive (HDD) crash. The onus of backing up data on the individual machine lies with individual user, as content typically needs to be selectively backed up. Though there may be several methods and tools available to configure automated backup of specific content on the machine, once configured only content that has been configured to be backed up will be backed up leaving the rest of the content vulnerable to loss by a HDD crash or a virus attack. A further disadvantage being the reliability of the HDD, wherein content that has not been backed up has a risk of losing critical and important content stored on the individual users machine.
Further, as described previously since the onus of backing up content on the individual machine lies with individual users, for business entities, this could mean enforcing all users in the business entity to periodically back-up contents stored on individual machines. A disadvantage with this being a waste of time and effort of the user in performing the task. A further disadvantage being the unnecessary use of resources being used as large amounts of content is duplicated.
Also, in cases when a user decides to backup his machine, the current backup solutions may not provide any suitable mechanism for easy identification of vulnerable and/or unique content on the users machine that should be necessarily backed up, where vulnerable and/or unique content is recognized to be exclusively on the users machine and a copy of that content is not stored or available any place else. A disadvantage in such a scenario being that the backup process is manually performed and time consuming adding to the disincentive that a user will not perform the task of backing up data periodically.
There is therefore a need for an efficient solution for identifying and backing, up critical content that is available on individual user machines, thereby avoiding any loss of content. Without a way to provide a method and system for efficiently identifying content and backing up that content the promise of this technology may never be fully achieved.